This blog describes Metatime in the Posthuman experience, drawn from Sir Isaac Newton's secret work on the future end of times, a tract in which he described Histories of Things to Come. His hidden papers on the occult were auctioned to two private buyers in 1936 at Sotheby's, but were not available for public research until the 1990s.

Wednesday, April 8, 2015

This blog has just passed 2 million hits! Welcome to the 1359th post and the end of the blog's fifth year. Thank you to everyone who has stopped here. Your time is precious and comments are always appreciated. Thank you to every interviewee who has been kind enough to discuss your work. And thank you to other bloggers I have met along the way, who have shown me the value of real-time publishing. These bloggers are all amazing people, intelligent and gifted mavericks (you know who you are), who know what to read on a desert island, and how to walk the line.

This blog was partly inspired by a site called The Strip, and partly by the late Mac Tonnies, whose blog (now in paperback on Amazon here) was published from 2003 until his untimely death in 2009. Tonnies' Posthuman Blues remains a landmark. Sometimes I revisit his blog, and I am still amazed by his ideas and vision, his uncanny ability to pin down the Zeitgeist, to channel the new Millennium's collective unconscious, to decrypt and encrypt a cultural environment of changing symbols, to describe the future.

Blogs remain relevant because some are still independent. Media independence? Political neutrality? What's that? Although media outlets co-opt blogs to make them branded social media products, some blogs remain artistic life statements and authentic testimonies. Readers follow a blogger on a personal journey as he or she tries to make sense of the exploding world of communications. So, Histories of Things to Come is based on a true story.

In May 2010, I wrote this first post on how changes in perspective inspire fear. That post includes a clip from The Innocents (1961), in which an interviewer asks Deborah Kerr's character, "Let me ask you a personal question. Do you have an imagination?" Maybe it comes as no surprise that Truman Capote helped write the screenplay for that film. There is something of him in that question, about how fear arises from even the smallest play on perspectives. And that is why independent blogs and other independent social media sites matter. They broaden perspectives, they keep the possibility alive that data can be free. They deal with information outside groomed algorithmic virtual realities and beyond well-worn virtual highways.

There is a seductive surge in online dynamics, a collective momentum. If something trends, it feels true, even if it is nonsense. People who get hits become authorities, sometimes entrenching their own ignorance, like the Gilgamesh Amateur. Emotional communities flock around shadowy consensuses and mistake their collective fervour for truth. That mentality marks the start of totalitarianism. Totalitarianism does not begin with the NSA bogeyman. A totalitarian state starts with its people, and the dictator and his henchmen merely step into the vacuum the people create.

In other words, it has never been more essential to record what is going on from an independent perspective, and it has never been more impossible. The bewitched, distracted Millennial mentality cannot find a consensus in historic reality, because it is also enclosed by search engines and social media. Algorithms reinforce the power of blind opinion by steering search results into cul-de-sacs, based on earlier browsing history; search engines guide us away from people with whom we disagree, to the point where we never see them at all. Inside the bubbles thus created, there is ant-heap chaos. You can turn the same facts around many ways and tell a thousand different stories. This was always true, but now the problem is out of control. Inside each solipsistic bubble, there is no true authority, no Pole Star pointing toward true north. Established institutions are collapsing, political and social certainties are fraying and falling apart, and conspiracy theories are everywhere. When it comes to making sense of the Internet, what can you believe? Is what makes sense to you personally really all that exists, or really what occurred? Infinite relativism further lays the groundwork for totalitarianism, not tolerance. When no one can agree on the truth of facts, much less the common good, you can't even establish a meritocracy, let alone - ha! - a decent democracy. As Yeats wrote in The Second Coming (1919): "The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity."

How do you write the history of the turn of the Millennium under these conditions? Like an analemma in the sky, you start to see patterns if you stare long enough, but the pieces are always shifting.
I started this blog while doing graduate work in history. In 2009, I wanted to write a history of the turn of the Millennium. At first, I thought I would write an academic monograph. But sources moved so quickly that a historical snapshot had to be taken day-by-day. Speed and volume of information did not pose the only problems. The other problem was perspective. My model was George Orwell, whose social commentaries and essays transcended the journalistic and political, even when he was being journalistic and political, and who foresaw so much of the Millennium in Nineteen Eighty-Four, based on his experiences with media coverage of the Spanish Civil War. During the Spanish Civil War, Orwell saw historical facts destroyed, erased, molded and remolded. He told Arthur Koestler: "History stopped in 1936." After that, sources were no longer sacrosanct. Before 1936, historians could reinterpret them, but 'facts' were respected, almost like tangible objects. After 1936, sources were willfully changed and altered in the journalistic media, by politicians, and anyone else with power over information. History became a moving target and reality became malleable.

This blog looks at these problems as a day-by-day history of our time, with all its wonders, its sad and amazing moments, which are gone in a blink, but remain in the Millennial moment of change. Irony: this blog has become more a historical source than history.

Thank you for following. I hope you will keep reading, and keep looking up!

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5 comments:

While I was reading the paragraph above describing totalitarian societies created from the ground up, I immediately flashed back to the 1968 film "The Candidate". It's only about an hour long, so it doesn't make the rounds much. I originally sought it out because I've been a Pink Floyd fan for years and had known since the eighties that they contributed to the soundtrack, but had never been able to catch it on avant garde cable channels or at art house theaters or video rental stores. Of course, I eventually found it on YouTube (which seems to have replaced all three of those outlets). It's sort of an anti-Kafka story, in which a young man finds himself at a retreat hosted by a shadowy organization interested in possibly benefitting him in some way that may ultimately be at a cost to others. It raises a moral question: if most people leave themselves susceptible to unscrupulous leaders, do we have a greater responsibility to destroy that susceptibility or to exploit it to prevent someone worse from taking control? Or would being in control simply make us worse? I'm going to have to rewatch it now, because I can't remember how it ends (obliquely, probably; it's a 1968 independent art film).

About Me

Welcome to my blog, dedicated to the aporia, anomie, mysteries, and nervous tensions of the turn of the Millennium. I'm a writer and academic, trained in the field of history. These are my histories of things that define the spirit of our times. This blog also goes beyond historians' visions of the past, and examines how metatime and time are perceived in other media and disciplines, between generations, and in high and pop culture.